This invention relates to an electronic mail determination method and system and a storage medium.
With a conventional electronic mail reception unit, the receiving person must check the contents of all received electronic mail and select necessary electronic mail. However, in recent years, information not requested by the receiving persons, such as direct mail, has been increasing. The storage capacity and output of the receiving unit are wasted on the unnecessary information, and the receiving person must spend most of the time in selecting received information and may miss or discard useful received information when selecting from the received information.
Then, to efficiently handle received electronic mail, the receiving person needs to handle electronic mail in response to the electronic mail contents in a different manner such that unnecessary electronic mail is deleted as it is received or that if the receiving person reads the electronic mail, he or she does this when he or she has some free time. Therefore, an electronic mail determination system for determining whether or not received electronic mail is unnecessary junk electronic mail becomes an important element.
As in a conventional electronic mail determination system, for example, character strings appearing in header fields and texts in junk electronic mail are previously stored as determination conditions, and when determining s whether nor not received electronic mail deserves to be read, a check is made to see if the character strings exist in the header field or text in the electronic mail.
However, in the conventional system, the work of extracting the conditions for determining electronic mail to be junk from the junk electronic mail must be executed by human hands. Therefore, determination performance cannot be maintained unless the receiving person executes the work each time a new type of junk electronic mail is sent.
An extremely large number of types of junk electronic mail exist and further a new type is created one after another and sent to receiving persons. Thus, the receiving person must spend much time in adding and maintaining the determination conditions.
The essence of the problems lies in that the determination conditions need to be prepared by human hands and that although electronic mail having the contents completely matching one determination condition can be determined junk, electronic mail having contents not completely matching one determination condition, but similar thereto cannot be determined junk.